I look up at the clock; 20 minutes left. If it wasn't for the cold winter air within the hall, I'd surely be sweating. My leg starts bouncing, racing, my heel starts rapidly tapping the ground. I put my eyes to the paper, realizing that I certainly don’t have enough time to get it done. Nor do I have enough time to check it over, making sure that my overall score earnt throughout the semester isn't completely destroyed by the weighting of this final time-pressured-memory-test exam.
The next 20 minutes flies by and a lady's voice on the PA system rings out into the hall to break me from my state. “Pens down. Please stop writing". I comply, putting my pen down and shaking my head, slightly in disbelief, and slightly in awe of how quick the past three hours went.
I hear the last ditch effort scribbles around me, the shuffling of papers, the sighs of relief, and witness the faces of people mouthing curse words across the room to their friends.
All of us, confined to our 80x40cm tables, prohibited to move or talk until the papers have been collected and counted, and our dismissal granted. Prisoners, so it would seem, enslaved to the education system. The very system that was founded in the 1800s. Long before people smiled in photos or women wore shorts, and far before a supercomputer the size of your hand, with more power than what was required to get a rocket to the moon in 1969, in the pocket of your favourite blue jeans.
Our Memory
Have you ever wondered how you can simply get in your car after a whole day at work or school, perhaps having learned a thing or two, met a person or three, or a combination of that and more, yet still make it home, without a thought or worry as to where your home actually is?
How is this amazing feat even possible? We can go back to where and when it was first developed, but let’s skip a few million years through evolution and arrive at the late 1500s when the late and great Julius Caesar Aranzi first referred to the location that is responsible for this as the hippocampus.
The hippocampus is what is known as our main memory hub and it teams with other structures inside the brain like the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex to enable our ability to store memories. Which, is putting it lightly.
They do say that we have roughly 2.5 petabytes of theoretical storage within our brains (~1 million gigabytes), but we can’t and don’t actually store things as you would with say, a flash-drive. But rather, our “storing” is the communication between neurons that build and build over time dependent upon the frequency that they are stimulated.
Read something enough times, go somewhere enough times, say someone’s name enough, and the neurons’ signal between one another gets stronger and stronger, further increasing our brains “storage” ability for those certain details. Events, locations, names, birthdays, passwords, the ability to access or recall them becoming easier with time, thanks to our initial “storing” of the information. Which is precisely the key when it comes to learning and retaining information, and exactly the opposite to what most schooling programs push the majority of their “cogs” to do during their 3-4 year degrees.
Cram and Forget
Maybe it’s our professors that are lazy or maybe they're just so stuck in their ways, but from a somewhat anecdotal point of view, it’s a little odd to say the least that the majority of people don’t actually learn in the typical university lecturing environment, but rather in their own time upon the countless YouTube educational channels and/or consulting resources other than their prescribed textbooks. What’s going on there?
If the professors and teachers were truly in it to help students learn and grow and actually inflict knowledge that is required to succeed, then wouldn’t it make sense for them to do away with teaching approaches like talking at the class, reading off lecture slides, and actually do their primary objective of teaching and inspiring?
Call me crazy, but I believe learning something should not be something that is forgotten within a week. Yet, ask someone that has recently finished an exam, and they’d be hard-pressed to remember everything that was taught to them over the semester. Even key details they crammed into their brain in the weeks leading up to the exam, completely gone.
I Did It This Way, So You Should Too
So, is it the amount of information that is taught per subject? The workload that is pushed upon students? What about the teachers? Maybe they’re overworked, underpaid. Maybe they just fell into the role of a teacher, pursuing the cultural norm for a respected full-time job and not the passion for influencing people. Or maybe, it’s the students. Maybe they’re just not built to focus on one thing at one time anymore.
The endless rabbit hole of clickable and relatable links that entice us every time we stumble on over to Facebook or Wikipedia, reveals how easy it is to succumb to the pull of viral videos and clickbait articles. Maybe we’re just no longer wired for a time-pressured silent exam, regardless of how our ancestors did it.
Allegedly, everyone’s parents walked to school. In the snow. With no shoes on. So we must consider ourselves lucky that we have things like shoes and heaters these days and a planet that doesn’t snow in every location. But, our world is different to what it once was. And that’s coming from someone who grew up reading the gold-edged pages of encyclopedias just to learn more about dinosaurs. Go back further than my two and a half decades, and I’m sure it was much, much different to my era filled with Discman’s and Super Nintendo’s.
Enter: The Future
“We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test”, Pasi Sahlberg states when discussing the American-influenced styles of sit-down exams. And perhaps it is what the rest of the world needs to embrace. Gone are the days where one is required to memorize every exact detail for every exact thing in life with our smartphones at an arms-length at any time of day. Perhaps the push towards an appreciation for concepts, knowledge, and information should be something that we expose people to. Entice people toward the path of discovery where they yearn to seek out more on topics that pique their interest.
An entire semester coming down to the result of a three-hour final exam hardly seems like the right way to assess people, and if countries like Finland can progress past the typical style of teaching, then maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world can too.